New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, left, and Governor Andrew Cuomo take part in press conference at the Capitol on Tuesday, July 2, 2013, where Governor Cuomo introduced the members of the Moreland Commission that will investigate public corruption around the state. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union archive)

The Cuomo administration manipulated a corruption probe before shutting it down.

THE STAKES:

The governor has done serious harm to the cause of good government that he himself championed.

How much political damage Gov. Andrew Cuomo has done to himself with his unseemly interference with the Moreland Commission on Public Corruption will be up to voters to decide. How much legal damage he did, we trust a hard-charging U.S. Attorney to get to the bottom of.

What's quite clear already, however, is the damage Mr. Cuomo has done to the cause of good government he once championed. And the damage is considerable.

The machinations of the governor and his staff in steering the Moreland Commission away from legitimate targets for investigation — targets that were too close to Mr. Cuomo — are only the latest breaches of Mr. Cuomo's promises to give good government back to the people of New York. Time and again, we've been disappointed to see Mr. Cuomo willfully go back on those promises and then offer unconvincing excuses, begging off under the guise of legal contortions or supposed political realities.

One thing is consistent across all these failures: Every broken promise has furthered Mr. Cuomo's power or control.

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Mr. Cuomo promised in his 2010 campaign to champion reform of New York's corrupt redistricting process, through which the Legislature controls the makeup of Assembly and Senate districts. It's a cynical system that allows lawmakers to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. But the Legislature — most of whose members also promised to create an independent panel — went ahead and did its own redistricting, then passed a constitutional amendment that was wholly inadequate. Mr. Cuomo, rather than standing in the way of all this as he promised, went along with it rather than antagonize the Legislature and jeopardize his bragging rights to lesser achievements, like on-time budgets.

The governor also touted an expansive election and campaign finance reform agenda when he ran for office, yet this year accepted from the Legislature not even half a loaf, but a crumb. No reining in of the obscenely high limits on campaign donations, no broad system of public financing to match small campaign contributions, no closing of glaring loopholes that have helped Mr. Cuomo and many others amass millions for their political war chests. But it suited Mr. Cuomo, who got himself the power to pick a somewhat more empowered investigator in the state Board of Elections.

And in perhaps the most intentional of his broken promises, Mr. Cuomo rejected his own idea of having the governor invest the attorney general with the power to broadly investigate corruption, including in the area of campaign finance. In a transparently self-serving reversal, he decided that the idea that he championed — while he was attorney general — might not be legal after all.

So instead, Mr. Cuomo appointed his own Moreland Commission on Public Corruption, inviting the current attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, along for the ride only as far as he was needed — to deputize the commission members. The governor vowed the commission would be "totally independent" and free to pursue wrongdoing anywhere in state government, including in his own office.

Yet as The New York Times noted in an expose last week, the Cuomo administration interfered with the commission's work from the get-go. Mr. Cuomo, through his aides and his hand-picked director on the commission, steered it away from targets too close to him, including the politically influential and financially generous Real Estate Board of New York, and a firm that handles his political advertising. And then he shut the commission down, its work far from finished.

His explanation? The commission, he asserts now, couldn't investigate him, because he created it, so it would be a conflict of interest. Nor can he be accused of interfering with it, he offers, because it's his commission.

You don't have to be a middle schooler to hear this and want to roll your eyes and say, "Wow."

Some people are doing more than rolling their eyes, and rightly so. Good government groups are blasting Mr. Cuomo's actions. And U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has seized the commission's files and told the Cuomo administration to preserve its correspondence with the commission.

Mr. Cuomo, we have often noted, is an exceptional politician — skilled at pulling the levers of government and adept at winning policy arguments. And he has plenty of accomplishments as governor to be proud of. But he has squandered the opportunity to claim the mantle of a reformer.

He owes the people of New York better. Better than an aborted corruption probe. Better than legalistic excuses and rationalizations. And better than a trail of broken promises.